A Guide to Better User Interaction Using Windows Phone 8 Tiles

Introduction

Tiles are an innovative way the Windows Phone platform attempts to differentiate from competitors. Live tiles make interaction more personal by providing notifications on the Start screen itself. In this article, we will learn about the Tile feature available on Windows Phone 8.

What are Tiles?

Tiles are the modern replacement of application shortcut icons. What makes them different on the Windows Phone 8 platform is the fact that the icons are interactive, making them a lot more than static icons. The tiles can change how they are displayed to communicate to the user about any status changes in the application.

Every app can have at least one default tile, which is created by pinning the app to the Start screen. Clicking this tile will result in launching the app main page.

Since space is limited on the Start screen, Windows Phone 8 allows users to “pin” the tiles of the applications, which might be of interest. There are a few applications whose tiles are, by default, pinned on Windows Phone 8, like “People” and “Mail”.

What are Secondary Tiles?

Windows 8 revolutionizes the concept of tiles further by allowing users to pin multiple tiles for an application. For example, if there was an application that showed traffic conditions, a user might be interested to know the traffic conditions of both his work place and his residence. Secondary tiles help fill that need.

Tile Templates

There are three visual templates available to use tiles. Tiles can be set at compile tile by setting the startup behavior. To programmatically change tiles, we can use scheduled local notifications or use a cloud service with push notifications.

The default tile for the application needs to be carefully chosen since the template cannot be changed programmatically. Secondary tiles are created dynamically; hence there is freedom to choose the template in the code.

To setup a file, open up the WMAppManifest.xml in Visual Studio by double-clicking the file.

Open WPAppManifest.xml

You will notice that you can select the type of template for the application under “Tile Template” on the Application Manifest settings.

When Flip Template is selected as “Tile Template” and “Support for large tiles” is checked, we will need to provide a large tile image.

If Cycle Tile template is selected, you can provide up to 9 different cycle images, with the minimum being 1.

You can provide up to 9 different cycle images

For flip tile template, you can specify a number in the tile, which can be used to represent a count of updates to the application. For that, we need to open WMAppManifest.xml file in the text format and make the following change.

The above code updates the count information on the tile to a random value.

If you are following along, you can download the sample code from here.

Now deploy your application and pin it to the start screen. You will notice that the App icon on the screen has “10” as the count. Now, click the button and go back to the start screen. You will notice that the count value has changed for the application tile. That is because the click action caused an update to the tile.

Summary

In this article, we learned about tile support in Windows Phone 8. I hope you have found this information useful.

About this author

Vipul Patel is a Program Manager currently working at Amazon Corporation. He has formerly worked at Microsoft in the Lync team and in the .NET team (in the Base Class libraries and the Debugging and Profiling team). He can be reached at vipul.patel@hotmail.com